Read Online Execution: A Guide to the Ultimate Penalty by Geoffrey Abbott - Free Book Online

than in other European countries, up to 40 blows being regularly delivered. No strangling cord was used, the coup de grâce being a blow aimed at the chest or the nape of the neck.
    In the sixteenth century the Warden of the Wheel in Nuremberg was Master Franz Schmidt, the public executioner, who bestrode the scaffold from 1573 to 1617. That he was well practised in his art is evidenced by the fact that during his 44 years of service he executed no fewer than 400 law-breakers by hanging, drowning, beheading or on the wheel. Tall, bearded, well built, always sober, Franz prided himself on his professionalism, meting out the court’s sentences with dedication blended with whatever mercy was deserved, especially where female criminals were concerned.
    The list of those broken on the wheel by him is long and draconian. On one day, 5 June 1573, not only triple-murderer Barthel, and Gronla Weygla, guilty of five murders, died in that manner, but also Meussel, who had stabbed two men to death in order to steal their money.
    In the following year Schmidt no doubt achieved a certain amount of satisfaction in dispatching Kloss Renckhart who, with an associate, committed three murders. Having killed two members of his gang for various reasons he, together with another accomplice, attacked an isolated mill.
    They shot the miller dead and then forced his wife and the aid to fry some eggs in fat. Putting the food on the miller’s corpse, Renckhart kicked the body, exclaiming, ‘Miller, how do you like this morsel?’ and then forced the wife to eat the eggs. He was arrested after plundering the mill, and later kept an appointment with Schmidt and the iron bars on the scaffold.
    Sometimes iron clubs were not used; instead, the criminal would be beheaded by the sword, his body then being exposed on the wheel. This occurred when, on 6 August 1579, Michael Dieterich, one of three robbers, was sentenced to death.
    Among the crowds watching the procession to the scaffold was Dieterich’s wife who, until that moment, had had no idea that her own husband would be one of those in the executioner’s cart – nor had she ever had any suspicions that he was engaged in any nefarious deeds. But Schmidt was waiting, and only a brief farewell was possible.
    Dieterich might be applauded for his duplicity, but he certainly lacked the audacity of Hans Horn who, having committed two murders, slew a pedlar in the woods with a chopper. Not only did he take eight florins from his victim, and cover the corpse with brushwood, but he had the nerve to seek out the pedlar’s wife and marry her! Schmidt took good care of him, too.
    As if having one’s arms and legs broken with iron bars wasn’t enough, many criminals were first subjected to torture, their arms ‘nipped with red-hot pincers’. One such was George Taucher who, at three o’clock in the morning, killed a tavern-keeper’s potboy by slitting his throat with a knife. The searing agony of the glowing tongs, followed by the shattering blows of the iron bar, soon convinced him of the error of his ways.
    Probably the occasion which tested Franz’s single-mindedness to the maximum was when he had to execute his own brother-in-law. Yet, loyal to his oath, he administered two tweaks with the red-hot tongs to his relative who, after having been allowed to embrace his daughter on the scaffold, was subjected to no fewer than 31 blows of the iron bar before he expired.
    Early in the nineteenth century executions were carried out not on the wheel but by the wheel, it being used as a weapon with which the victim was struck. The Percy Anecdotes, written in 1823, quotes the account of an execution witnessed by a traveller in 1819, which took place near Berlin, his description of the scene being particularly vivid:

‘A triangular gibbet is raised in the centre of an extensive plain commanding a view of the city; attached to this gibbet is a stone platform, lightly railed in with iron, so as to admit of all